Bill Berkowitz: Unleashing “The Beast”: COVID-19 Invading and Devastating Prisons

July 28th 2020

Barbed Fence, Prison USA (babawawa)

By Bill Berkowitz 

In jails and prisons across the country, crowding, poor sanitary conditions, limited health care, and high rates of chronic illness among incarcerated people make it nearly impossible to control the spread of infectious diseases. In addition, testing for the coronavirus in prisons has been spotty at best. Several disastrous prison transfers in California, resulted in dramatic increases in coronavirus cases. As one incarcerated prisoner said, “the ‘beast’ came with them.”

As of July 21, since the advent of the coronavirus pandemic, more than 70,000 people in prison have tested positive in facilities across the country, according to The Marshall Project, which since March has been collecting data on COVID-19 infections in state and federal prisons. Nearly 47,000 have recovered, and more than 680 have died. Over 12,400 infections have been reported among staff, including 46 deaths.

The Marshall Project recently reported, “New cases among prisoners reached an all-time high in mid-July after slowing down in June. The growth was driven by big jumps in prisoners testing positive in Texas, California and the federal Bureau of Prisons as well as outbreaks in Idaho, Iowa, Oregon and South Carolina.

In a story dated July 26, and titled “US prison population down 8% amid coronavirus outbreak,” The Marshall Project in collaboration with The Associated Press found that “Between March and June, more than 100,000 people were released from state and federal prisons, a decrease of 8%, according to their nationwide analysis. The drops range from 2% in Virginia to 22% in Connecticut. By comparison, the state and federal prison population decreased by 2.2% in all of 2019, according to a report on prison populations by the Vera Institute of Justice.”

The Marshall Project’s Damini Sharma and Weihua Li and Denise Lavoie and Claudia Lauer of The Associated Press pointed out:

But this year's decrease has not come because of efforts to release vulnerable prisoners for health reasons and to manage the spread of the virus raging in prisons, according to detailed data from eight states compiled by The Marshall Project and AP. Instead, head counts have dropped largely because prisons stopped accepting new prisoners from county jails to avoid importing the virus, court closures meant fewer people were receiving sentences and parole officers sent fewer people back inside for low-level violations, according to data and experts. So the number could rise again once those wheels begin moving despite the virus.

A recent report by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) found that releasing incarcerated prisoners during the coronavirus pandemic has not resulted in rising crime rates. According to “Decarceration and Crime During COVID-19,” collected data from 29 localities -- most of which had reduced their population during the pandemic – “found that the reduction in jail population was functionally unrelated to crime trends in the following months. In fact, in nearly every city explored, fewer crimes occurred between March and May in 2020 compared to the same time period in 2019, regardless of the magnitude of the difference in jail population.”

“Any national strategy to eradicate COVID-19 needs to focus aggressively on reducing outbreaks within prisons,” Brendan Saloner, PhD, an associate professor of health policy and management at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore, Maryland, told Healthline.“COVID-19 got into prisons in the first place through the outside world — such as staff or visitors — and it will never stay within prisons,” he said.

Healthline reported “In a letter published this month in JAMA, Saloner and colleagues reported that the COVID-19 case rate is 5.5 times higher in state and federal prisons than in the general population. When they made adjustments for age and sex, the authors of the letter found that the death rate from COVID-19 in prisons is three times higher than average.”

The ACLU’s “Decarceration and Crime During COVID-19,” maintained that “Arresting fewer people and releasing people from jail during a pandemic, as the 29 localities … have done, has undoubtedly saved lives in jails and in surrounding communities. What’s more, crime was lower this spring in nearly every location, and the amount of decarceration or incarceration appears uncorrelated with crime patterns. 

“No state has gone far enough, and all should continue to reduce their jail, prison, and detention center populations, particularly for those who are most vulnerable. The potentially fatal threat of COVID-19 in jails and prisons, and the risk of transmission between jail staff and the surrounding populations, should be reason enough to release as many people as possible.”